Explosive Eighteen by Janet Evanovich

”I don’t feel so good,” Lula said. “It was that last doughnut. There was something wrong with it. It was one of them cream-filled, and I think they used old cream.”

”You ate ten!”

”Yeah, and none of the others bothered me. I’m telling you, it was that last doughnut. I’d feel better if I could burp.”

A typical exchange in Explosive Eighteen between Janet Evanovich’s stalwart bounty hunter Stephanie Plum and her loyal offsider, zaftig ex-prostitute Lula involves junk food. Lula nabs her prey with an aplomb that matches her appetite, and breaks for reviving fried-chicken lunches several times a day. (Shortly after the above conversation, the two women use the scent of a fresh pizza to apprehend an FTA (failure to appear) – but not before Lula packs away several slices: “I thought it might settle my stomach, but I was wrong.”)

The funny thing about the Plum series, now 18 books deep, is that while there’s nothing new under the Jersey sun, the set-pieces are so sharply written, the dialogue so snappy and the supporting cast so deliciously batty that the lure is as irresistible as that pizza.

Stephanie is a Jersey-fied, loosely mob-linked, grown-up Trixie Belden. She works at Vincent Plum Bail Bonds, the business owned by her erstwhile cousin, who has so much trouble staying on the right side of the law long enough to get any straight work done that Stephanie basically runs the show.

The plots of the Plum books are beside the point, and in Explosive Eighteen Evanovich has barely bothered. Between skits involving the captures of FTAs and bone-crunching takedowns of anonymous bad guys, she makes a stab at a putative storyline: on a flight from Miami to New Jersey, Stephanie is seated next to a man who, by mistake, puts an unmarked surveillance photograph of an unidentified man in her carry-on bag. On discovering it at home, she traces it back to her aircraft companion . . . who has since been found murdered and stuffed in an airport rubbish bin. The photograph is of value and is sought by many, but Stephanie has already disposed of it.

You’ll forget how the matter is resolved even as you’re reading. What constant readers will relish are Stephanie’s encounters with longtime paramours Ranger and Morelli (both of whom feature in the sojourn to Miami), and the family-dinner interludes, which are hilariously discomforting to all but her elderly grandmother:

”You need Annie to help you,” Grandma said. “She’s real smart. She’s fixing everyone up at bowling. She even had a man in mind for me, but I told her he was too old. I don’t want some flabby, wrinkled codger to take care of. I want a young stud with a nice firm behind.”

My mother refilled her wineglass and my father put his fork down and hit his head on the table. BANG, BANG, BANG, BANG.

“Go for it,” I said to Grandma.

“I’m not so old,” Grandma said. “There’s parts of me don’t sit as high as they used to, but I’ve got some miles left.”

My father pantomimed stabbing himself in the eye with his fork.

There’s no shortage of pace left in her granddaughter either. Evanovich is on a good wicket, and with the first movie adaptation of a Plum novel, One for the Money, coming soon with Katherine Heigl in the lead role, the series is likely to remain high-octane for a while yet.

2.5 / 5 stars: Frivolity that stays on just the right side of profane.

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The Real Katie Lavender by Erica James

If Erica James has carved out a niche for herself in the cluttered world of light romance fiction, it is one in which vile weather never descends, there is no such thing as a traffic jam, and the laundry is done by little elves who come in the night. Reading one of her books is like escaping into such a world – the intellectual equivalent of sinking into a warm bath clutching a glass of wine after a very long day.

In this sense, there is little to distinguish her latest, The Real Katie Lavender, from 2010’s The Queen of New Beginnings or the 13 novels that preceded them. Where James flexes her imagination most is in the set-up: Katie Lavender is a 30-year-old woman who in the opening pages is sacked unceremoniously from her job in media production. She takes this on the chin, largely because she knows real loss. Three years ago, her father died abruptly from septicaemia caused by food poisoning (who knew to be afraid of that?), and it is one year since the death of her mother.

Katie, an only child, was close to her parents and is bereft – but this being the type of story it is, James steers delicately away from an analysis of grief and towards Katie’s irreverent best friends Tess and Zac and, most usefully, towards a letter from a lawyer’s office summoning her for a meeting.

Perplexed, she arrives to be informed of the truth about her parentage. She is not her father’s biological daughter but the product of a brief affair during her parents’ marriage. Her father forgave her mother and raised Katie as his own. Her natural father is apparently a man both of conscience and some standing, for he has endowed her, she now learns, with a trust fund worth more than £750,000.

Her curiosity piqued, she goes in search of Stirling Nightingale, and in the most ludicrous of a series of implausible positionings – this is where the wine comes in handy – stages her first meeting with him by posing as a waitress at the 90th birthday celebration for his mother, Cecily. There she also encounters his two grown children with Gina, his wife of 34 years, and meets her obnoxious, egotistical half-brother (Rosco, 32), and her pregnant, self-absorbed, 29-year-old half-sister Scarlet.

On the same occasion, Stirling receives a visit from the police with the news that his brother and business partner Neil has been found dead. The suicide was prompted, it transpires, by events including the embezzlement of money from the firm’s clients and an extramarital affair. Neil’s wife Pen, a gifted gardener with a sweet exterior and a core of steel, is blindsided.

The stage is set for romantic trials and family travails . . . but wait, where’s the love interest? That would be Lloyd, Neil and Pen’s son. (If you’ve deduced that this makes him Katie’s first cousin, you’d be right – but you can be sure Ms James has a solution.)

The Real Katie Lavender is the brightest and most undemanding of chick lit. There are idyllic settings – Pen’s glorious gardens, the majestic Nightingale family home, Lloyd’s cosy love nest – and a clutch of themes that are sufficiently stimulating in the moment to hold attention but not so unsavoury as to be unpleasant reading (infidelity and other garden-variety secrets and lies, troublesome relationships with in-laws). There is nothing to offend a sensitive reader or to please those with exacting literary standards – but the rest of us are comfortably served.

2 / 5 stars: Safe, supremely unchallenging chick-lit.

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The Quest for Anna Klein by Thomas H Cook

I knew of Chekhov, but was unfamiliar with his hammer until I read a passage in Thomas H Cook’s spellbinding historical novel-cum-spy thriller, The Quest for Anna Klein. The implement is mentioned during a late-night conversation in the hushed gloom of the patrician Century Club in New York City shortly after the fall of the Twin Towers. There, a bright young graduate student sits metaphorically at the knee of a mysterious octogenarian, who has summoned him to hear his life story.

The ostensible purpose of the meeting is for Paul Crane to draw information from the former anti-Nazi agent that might help the US government with its inchoate war on terror, but as Thomas Jefferson Danforth’s story unfolds, Crane hears a tale not of expert warfare but of mid-century European horrors, triple-crosses, dummy cyanide caplets and deathless obsession.

And Chekhov’s hammer? It refers, Danforth tells Crane, to the Russian writer’s musing “that at the door of every happy person, there should be someone tapping with a little hammer, just as a reminder, soft but steady, that there are unhappy people in the world.” It’s an arresting notion, and the text is laced with such cultural gems: the aborted plan for a monstrous Palace of the Soviets; the story of would-be Hitler assassin Maurice Bavaud; the sentimental US secretary of war who spared Kyoto from nuclear attack.

The model seen in The Quest for Anna Klein – a simple storyline overlaid with intersecting subplots and rich with fascinating factoids – is the same as that perfected by Dan Brown, which is no backhand compliment. It’s a clever way to produce an historical thriller that leaps between the early 2000s and Europe during World War II, the latter among the most trampled ground in all of modern fiction. It adds scope and grandeur, makes the characters more worldly and the reader feel smarter, and permits no flag in pace, even as Danforth languishes in prison for nearly 20 years (though Cook spares us any Solzhenitsyn-esque rumination).

Danforth meets and falls in love with the object of his affection during World War II, when he joins a small team of conspirators who plot to kill Hitler and sabotage the German war effort. Their exploits are recounted through Danforth’s reminiscences with Crane, and the seamlessness with which Cook darts between the two creates a lively, kinetic energy that never succumbs to the mustiness of refracted memory.

If the point is the titular activity, in the end Danforth’s quest is more metaphorical than literal. Anna is elusive, almost non-corporeal, and impossible for Danforth to grasp or possess. Even the most fundamental aspects of her identity remain in question years after her wartime activity. She is likened specifically to Joan of Arc, while Danforth perceives in her “a fatalism she had long ago accepted, making her seem like a woman walking toward her future just as religious martyrs walked towards their execution sites”.

As they plot the murder of Hitler, an undertaking which includes an astonishing scene of Fuhrer attending a viewing of his paintings with Danforth and Anna, it emerges that none of the many who in real life attempted the same lived to tell about it. Those who weren’t slain in their tracks inevitably perished in prison.

Cook captures the audacity and danger of this enterprise, and of the ensuing banality of being sentenced to life without such exotic invigoration, with precision. The Quest for Anna Klein justifies the effort of pursuit.

2.5 / 5 stars: An historical novel with an edge.

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The Impossible Dead by Ian Rankin

Two years after ushering in a new hero, in his first post-Rebus novel The Complaints, the incomparable Ian Rankin returns with the sophomore tale of Scottish DI Malcolm Fox, top man in the Internal Affairs division.

It’s an inspired premise – cops investigating and interrogating other cops can be nothing but rich dramatic ground – and in The Impossible Dead, Rankin marries relentless internecine warfare and a terrorism theme with a practiced hand.

Fox and his team are summoned to Fife to look into a complaint against one Paul Carter, a DC whom a young woman, Teresa Collins, has accused of sexual harassment. After her accusations were made public, two other women emerged with similar stories. Though Carter has three colleagues backing up his version (inoffensive) of events, Fox’s questioning of Alan Carter, Paul’s uncle and a retired cop, gives credence to the allegations.

Fox’s visit to Alan Carter’s home also ushers in the plot proper – in true Rankin style, the opening subplot is merely an amuse-bouche. As Fox and Alan chat, the investigator not only learns everything he needs to about the impeached Paul Carter, he also discovers what is occupying the older man’s time these days: an examination of the apparent suicide 15 years ago of a local lawyer, Francis Vernal, who had ties to Scottish paramilitary groups. Agitating for a separate Parliament, the groups used means both fair and foul to achieve their goal of a legitimate, representative Scottish National Party.

Alan Carter was commissioned to do the work by Charles Mangold, a fellow lawyer who, upon being bailed up by Fox, is cagey as to whether he is motivated by loyalty to an old friend or a greater fealty to Imogen, Vernal’s icy, inscrutable widow.

Shortly thereafter, two key players perish, and The Impossible Dead – the title perhaps a reference both to the monotonous difficulties of homicide investigation and the ability of some deceased to remain a pain-in-the-jacksy for those still living – kicks into high gear. Wiretaps, historical bombings and compromised cop work ensue.

Like The Complaints and Rankin’s earlier, legendary Rebus books, The Impossible Dead is structurally flawless. Even the most experienced crime writers can succumb to the temptation of leaving a truck-sized hole here or there in the interests of narrative momentum, and papering over it with diverting character-work and inventive twists.

Rankin respects his readership, among them many who have followed him since long before he first topped the book lists, and applies an unusual degree of discipline to his writing. Acknowledging the plague that threatens many a writer in the high-octane crime genre, he sticks to an ascetic schedule that allows him to elude the embarrassing trap of confusing characters’ names and deeds or running the narrative off-course. To wit, he started writing The Impossible Dead this past January and finished the first draft in 10 weeks, then spent the next six months editing before hopping on the pre-publication promotional treadmill in September.

Such prolific output could be interpreted as a gimlet-eyed mercenary enterprise, but as Rankin told The Independent in October, writers who have already made a handsome fortune, such as himself, Grisham and Patterson, keep writing because their work is “how [we] make sense of the world, it’s what [we’ve] always done.”

In that, the creator has everything in common with his Mr Fox.

3 / 5 stars: Rankin reigns.

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I Don’t Know How She Does It by Allison Pearson

The redoubtable Kate Reddy, Allison Pearson’s imagined exemplar of the plight of the high-achieving working mother, began her life in a series of columns in The Guardian before appearing in the multimillion-seller I Don’t Know How She Does It in 2002. The novel is hitting shop shelves once again ahead of the New Zealand release (3 November) of the film adaptation, in which Sarah Jessica Parker will portray the frenzied fund manager.

The narrative arc is not hard to follow: most of the story consists of Kate, mother of a five-year-old and a toddler, attempting to juggle her responsibilities at work and home while skirting around the edges of an emotional affair. Kate’s husband Richard is something of a cipher, a ghostly character both in the novel and his wife’s life. His spectre comes into sharper focus in the final quarter, when he becomes the catalyst for Kate’s inevitable confrontation with herself.

Kate can be flaky; she spends time she doesn’t have fretting about what her in-laws will think of her son’s lingering attachment to his dummy, she is intimidated by her nanny, and her inability to say no has her condemned to a nauseous whirligig of business trips. But not far below the surface dwells a feistiness that emerges when she needs it most. She deals with pitiless alacrity to a colleague who bullies Kate’s talented protégé, and sets about repairing her marriage with the same single-mindedness that equips her to buy a season’s worth of high-end shoes in five minutes.

These may be traits shared by the author. In the wake of her debut novel’s success, Pearson was commissioned by Miramax in 2003 to write a second novel, to be delivered in 2005 and for which she was paid a hefty advance of US$700,000. When the copy failed to materialize, Miramax filed a lawsuit. The book, I Think I Love You, was finally published in 2010, not long after Pearson was involved in a public spat with Sarah Ferguson, who objected to disparaging remarks Pearson made about her daughter Princess Beatrice’s physique.

There is also a snappishness to Kate, a sharp edge that dulls as, one by one, the balls she is juggling fall to the ground. This prickliness and Pearson’s eye for wry detail enrich the novel: Kate has learned not to return from business trips without gifts for her daughter, who has amassed a global Barbie collection “now so sensationally slutty, it can only be a matter of time before it becomes a Tracey Emin exhibit.”

As she welcomes a group of new trainees to her firm, she recalls her own sweaty-palmed induction, when she couldn’t decide if she should cross her legs (“whether it was worse to look like the Duchess of Kent or Sharon Stone”), and had spent the last of her money to buy a suit that made her resemble “a Wolverhampton schools inspector.”

Later, as Kate’s marriage fractures, the recollections become more poignant. She reflects on the agony of returning to work nine weeks after giving birth, still breastfeeding and taking a cab home every day to feed her daughter – then attempting a panicked weaning when she is dispatched suddenly on a five-day business trip.

Kate’s story will likely strike a chord with as many women today as it did in its first go-round, and there is more in it should Pearson be so inspired – I Don’t Know How She Does It’s resolution is, like its heroine’s life, far from tidy.

3 / 5 stars: A story to strike fear into the heart of any would-be working mother. 

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Matilda is Missing by Caroline Overington

Despite being the purported subject of the novel, Matilda was absent for roughly the first half of Australian writer Caroline Overington’s thoughtful new work Matilda is Missing. The early chapters are concerned with the family drama of 60-something Barry and Pat, the parents of four adult sons adjusting with ease to late middle age until one son, Brian, brings home his blowsy new girlfriend. That Nerida, at 20, is already mother to a four-year-old is one reason Pat takes an instant dislike to her – but her antipathy is moderated by the arrival of two more boys, and the happy grandparents become frequent caregivers.

Combustion comes when Nerida is unfaithful to Brian and throws him out of the marital home (it struck me that Overington’s mothers are shown in a slightly more imperfect light than the hapless but generally well-intentioned fathers – other readers may beg to differ).

In the midst of the meltdown, Barry has his biannual chat with his old school friend Frank, now a Family Court judge, whom Barry is shocked to find frail and weak from terminal cancer. Frank alludes to a mistake that must be righted, a need to “get the truth out there” – but dies just three weeks later, before he can tell Barry what he needs his friend to do. It is left to Barry, with the assistance of Frank’s former secretary, to sift through mounds of legal documents relating to a court case involving a well-known local man, Rick Hartshorn – which is where Matilda, somewhat belatedly, enters the picture.

Matilda is the daughter of Rick’s stepson, Garry, the primary cause of the novel’s suspense. As Barry learns from the files – chiefly, in a clever narrative device, by listening to taped conversations between a court-appointed psychologist, Dr Bell, and the two estranged spouses, Garry and Softie – Garry and his sister were abandoned when very young. The sister shuffled through state guardianship before dying in her teens, while Garry was adopted by a caring couple, Joan and John Cooper, whose biological son, Beam, was born severely handicapped. After John Cooper’s sudden and premature death, Joan married Hartshorn, whose prominence and wealth afforded security.

In their late 30s, following a rapid courtship and too-hasty wedding, Garry and Softie produce Matilda, but the marriage is over before it has begun, and the custody decision, with both parents requesting full-time responsibility, falls to Frank Brooks, and here occurs the mistake.

All of the above barely touches on what Matilda is Missing is truly about – Overington packs a lot of plot into 350 pages – and it would do a subtle story a disservice to attempt to boil it down or latch it to a genre.

Part of the subject matter – what becomes of the children of warring parents – piqued my curiosity as to the writer’s own background. I found her website, where she declared the book (her fifth) “fully informed by the many custody battles I’ve had to cover, in my role as a reporter for The Australian.”

Makes sense. There is a human messiness to Matilda is Missing, and an astuteness to Barry’s non-judgemental eye, that is unlikely to emerge from even the most fertile imagination. What Overington shares of what she has seen will resonate with many.

2.5 / 5 stars: Overington knows of what she writes.

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Good as Dead

It can’t be easy being a bestselling crime writer these days. With the likes of Lee Child, Val McDermid and Janet Evanovich regularly issuing two novels inside a single year, their competitors can ill afford to leave it too long between drinks – particularly if they are the architect of a complex and soulful recurring lead with a loyal fan base.

In the veritable nick of time Mark Billingham has graced us with another outing of his marvellous Detective Inspector Tom Thorne, in the affecting hostage drama Good as Dead. (Thorne’s last adventure, and his creator’s fascinating backstory, are recounted in this review of 2010’s From the Dead.)

The stakes are high. Popping into her local newsagent one south London morning, Detective Sergeant Helen Weeks is taken hostage with another man by the owner, Javed Akhtar.

Weeks and Akhtar had been collegial, even friendly, over the many months of her patronage, but what she didn’t know was that Akhtar was a man aggrieved – first by the incarceration of his teenage son Amin for his involvement in a knifing incident in which another boy died, and then over the apparent suicide of Amin by drug overdose in his youth prison’s hospital wing.

Akhtar believes his son a murder victim, and Helen Weeks is the leverage he will use to force the metropolitan police to prove it. He has chosen wisely: Weeks is not only herself an officer, in the Child Protection Unit, she also knows Thorne, who is drafted into the team of investigators assigned to the case.

More poignantly, she is the single mother of a young son, and as the hours tick by, her determination not to leave him parentless manifests in a total loss of trepidation about manipulating both Akhtar and her sometimes hapless colleagues through the regular phone calls her captor permits. The separate workings of Weeks’ and Thorne’s minds, as the former struggles to contain Akhtar’s emotional, erratic state and Thorne painstakingly sources the information the stricken father seeks, are a joy to behold.

Where Billingham has particularly excelled is in the clever beading together of disparate criminal elements: first, the provocation of Amin and resulting death; then an alleged sexual attack in prison that is given as the motive for Amin’s suicide; Javed’s highly illegal reaction to the loss of his son; and the generic, miserable murk of Amin’s fellow jailbirds, one by one tracked down by Thorne’s team for their accounts of his life inside – and what he was doing out so late on the fateful night, having told his parents he was studying.

At nearly 400 pages, Good as Dead is dense but well-paced – Billingham is far too skilled a storyteller not to use the race-against-the-clock premise to its best advantage. It would be easy to tell such a story clinically and let the discovery of the ‘truth’ about Amin be the dramatic payoff, but that would be to waste the three people in a room (one with a loaded gun), the lost child and anchorless father, the brilliant cop with emotional burdens that he daren’t cast off. The resolution is serious, moving and allows everyone concerned to preserve their dignity.

A real day in Thorne’s world would see most of us carted off in a stretcher, but it sure is fun to visit.

3 / 5 stars: It’s Tom Thorne’s world – we just live in it.

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The Lost Wife

Is there anything as sure to provoke tears as a Holocaust drama? Towards the end of Alyson Richman’s The Lost Wife I was a bundle of frayed nerves and impatience, eager to see how she handled the moments after the reunion shown in the opening chapters, but fretting, as the pages wound down, that there wasn’t space to do so satisfyingly.

Whether you are sated will depend on your appetite for extreme romantic ordeals. Josef and Lenka are young Czech Jews who meet in the late 1930s, as the shadow of Nazi Germany is lengthening across Europe, and Jewish families, heretofore strangers to anti-Semitism, become the objects of rapidly intensifying race hatred in their businesses and communities.

Lenka has grown up happily, the daughter of a glass dealer and housewife. Her parents’ marriage is exceptionally happy, her mother beautiful and her father’s business thriving. The only strain comes from their difficulty conceiving a sibling for Lenka, but all is resolved when, at seven, she becomes the elder sister to Marta.

Meanwhile, Josef is the scion of a family of equal stability but lesser warmth: his autocratic father, a respected obstetrician, dominates Josef’s cowed mother and is unduly harsh in his treatment of his diligent, accomplished son. The family’s bright light is Veruska, Josef’s younger sister, a friend of Lenka’s at the Prague Academy of Art and the engineer of the pair’s meeting.

Their chemistry is immediate, and love, of a wholesome, idyllic kind, blossoms. They are just 16 and 20, and each other’s first love: neither has been sullied by ugly experience. This is important, for the combination of the relationship’s purity and its brevity makes each partner the other’s flawless fantasy over the many decades they spend apart.

After marrying quickly, with war impending, they spend only a few days together before Josef and his family leave for England, en route to the United States. The arrangement had been that Josef’s cousin in the US would secure visas for Lenka and her family, but Lenka learns that there is passage only for her: she will have to leave her parents and sister behind. Knowing that she couldn’t bear the guilt of doing so, she refuses.

She and Josef exchange letters, plan their reunion . . . and then she learns from a newspaper report that Josef’s ship from Liverpool was attacked by a German U-boat. He and his family are listed, incorrectly, among the dead. Josef scours post-war documents for news of Lenka – whose life in concentration camps is unflinchingly, and lengthily, depicted by Richman – and comes to believe she too has perished.

Both marry others and raise families, finding safety but no peace. Richman diligently tracks their stories down the years, but what we’re waiting for is the resolution to the exceptional instant she affords us at the novel’s start, when an elderly couple crosses paths at the New York wedding of her granddaughter and his grandson. There is something familiar about her. He takes her arm, pushes up her sleeve to find a six-number tattoo, and he knows she is his Lenka, his lost wife.

Though there is rediscovery, The Lost Wife is the story of nearly intolerable loss, told with delicacy and empathy.

3 / 5 stars: Melodramatic and harrowing.

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The Lovers

San Francisco writer Vendela Vida’s The Lovers is a classic slow-burner. The premise is simple: an American woman, two years widowed, journeys back to the idyllic seaside town in Turkey where she honeymooned 28 years earlier.

She is due to spend nine days at a rented house in Datça before meeting her son Matthew and his fiancée on a cruise. The companionship of Matthew’s erstwhile sister Aurelia, whose troubles with addiction were a source of shame for her parents, is unconfirmed. But upon arrival in Datça, Yvonne’s well-laid plans are set awry by the disinterment of memories and the appearance of her peculiar landlord Ali and his erratic wife Ozlem.

The first thing that occurred to me on finishing the book was that I still didn’t know who ‘the lovers’ were – on the face of it, there aren’t any to be found. Presumably the title refers to Yvonne and Peter on their Datça honeymoon, an event on which Yvonne reflects only intermittently, instead dwelling at more length on the beginning and end of their relationship.

Indeed, Vida’s imagining of the pair’s not-so-chance meeting is the loveliest passage in a book where most of the beauty is found in the writer’s delicate recreation of the coastal environs, the scent of the air and ocean and the flora. (The time Vida spent in Turkey to prepare the novel was well spent.)

None of the other couples are easily seen as lovers, and most are glimpsed only from a distance – we never meet Matthew and his betrothed, or Aurelia’s boyfriend. On a boating trip Yvonne encounters Carol and Jimson, a disengaged but reflexively polite couple with whom Yvonne reluctantly exchanges contact details at the end of the day, knowing that “their time on Cleopatra’s Island, and her story of Peter’s death, would blur into other stories they heard and movies they saw – if they remembered any detail at all.”

Such vagueness permeates – some might say maims – The Lovers. (At times I found myself peering at the pages, trying to make out precisely what Vida was seeking to express.) She sets up potential sub-plots that never quite come to fruition, such as the peculiar relationship between Ali and Ozlem (another of the non-lovers). Yvonne’s discovery of a sex toy in the quiet house is followed by a series of unannounced visits by each, but the embryonic storyline is discarded without a satisfying resolution.

It is as if she had one idea for her story, but cast it aside when she happened upon a more interesting relationship, the one set up halfway through the novel between Yvonne and Ahmet, a young local boy who makes a living as a shell collector. It is their meeting that prompts the single dramatic event of the novel, and shatters the air of nostalgia and muffled grief that threatens to swamp it.

Vida is a writer of exceptional capacity, which in The Lovers serves to outshine her characters. Don’t be surprised if you are left with a strange yearning for the sea.

2.5 / 5 stars: Written with rare beauty, The Lovers leaves you feeling that something has eluded you.

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The Sweet Second Life of Darrell Kincaid

Once in a while I happen upon a book that is so mood-lifting, so stonkingly readable and plain fun, that I finish it feeling the urge to surreptitiously drop copies everywhere I go, like a compulsive literary-litterer. When such a book is penned by a Kiwi and therefore just cause for a moment of patriotic pride, it’s all the sweeter.

Though that adjective crops up in the title, The Sweet Second Life of Darrell Kincaid avoids becoming saccharine through the deft application of wit and the resolute refusal of the heroine to take anything – including her own grief – too seriously.

Romance novelist Darrell – no, she doesn’t know why her parents chose that name either – is in her mid-30s and has been married for 10 years when her husband Tom drops dead from a heart attack immediately after completing a half-marathon.

Stunned and anchorless, Darrell flees New Zealand for London, where she encounters the first in a perfectly cast parade of supporting characters who add spice and depth to what will become her second life. Darrell strikes a discounted rental deal for a mid-renovation townhouse in Islington, and finds Clare, her hormonally-imbalanced five-months’-pregnant landlady, oscillating comically between tears, fits of jealousy and wild accusations of criminality directed at hapless tradesmen.

In the neighbourhood coffee shop, a haven for lonely and embattled souls, the plot thickens. Darrell espies two intriguing characters who earn the secret nicknames Mr Perfect and Miss Flaky. Upon being formally introduced to each, she strikes up a friendship with Mr Perfect – Claude, short for Claudius (the nameplay continues; Claude’s siblings are Augusta and Marcus).

Marcus, compelling in a way playboy characters rarely are, softens some of the edges of Darrell’s grief, but the hard work is hers alone to do. We know he’s not quite the right fit, and that if the book is as good on the final page as it promises to be throughout, Robertson will find the perfect resolution. She does.

With the confidence of a seasoned scribe, Robertson knows just where to direct her pen, and her choice of Darrell’s occupation gives her reason to reflect on the subtle distinctions of the genre: “Category romances are sold as a packaged line, each identified by a name like Captivate or Smouldering Liaisons, which is essentially a key to how filthy the books are.”

Occasional email exchanges between Darrell and her married-with-children best friend Michelle are alone worth the retail price:

DARRELL: He’s invited me to a garden party.

LADY MO: At Bucky Palais? Yeepers! Get out your hat!

Billed by the publisher as a romantic comedy in the chick-lit genre, The Sweet Second Life of Darrell Kincaid does tick those boxes . . . but I’m reluctant to see it categorized too sternly in case it causes some to pass it by. For it’s hard to see how the book could have been any better, more assured or engaging. Robertson is a new national treasure.

3.5 / 5 stars: Astonishingly good. A new Kiwi treasure has been found.

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